The importance of correct modeling of bubble size and condensation in prediction of sub-cooled boiling flows

Abstract

This paper describes the updating of the sub-cooled boiling model used in CFD codes with the more recent and better sub-models. The improved sub-models include: Hibiki and Ishii [1] correlation for nucleation site density, Kocamustafaogullari [2] correlation for bubble departure diameter and the S-gamma model of Lo and Rao [3] for bubble size distribution in the flow. The new model has been tested against measured data from Debora [4] and Bartolomei [5]. The results show that improvement in the bubble size prediction has the most significant impact on the accuracy of the model.